


Mundanity at the Nexus of Worlds

by Silex



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Demons, Gen, Humor, Monsters, No Plot/Plotless, Pirates, Randomness, Silly, Trick or Treat: Treat, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-28 17:13:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16246181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: It's just another day at work for Naiala, former pirate turned barista at a small coffee shop in the place between worlds. At least the clientele is interesting enough that her job is never boring.





	Mundanity at the Nexus of Worlds

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FairestCat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FairestCat/gifts).



It was another day at the coffee shop where Naiala had found herself working. Located in the nexus of worlds, a place between places, they had all manner of interesting customers. Today she found herself listening to a rather typical conversation between two of the regulars.

“And then I decided that if they were going to be that way I’d just leave,” Kiki wailed melodramatically, “So I jumped through the reflection of the night sky on a still lake and came here.”

It would have been much more impressive if Kiki wasn’t in her true form, that of a silver small fox with an unnatural number of tails, especially when the being seated next to her was also in his true form, that of a ram-headed man, rippling with muscle and a full eight feet tall when he stood on his cloven hooves. The demon had a name unpronounceable to humans and a sob story for anyone who would listen and Kiki, with her love of drama, was always willing to listen.

“At least you could get back if you wanted to,” the demon sighed in a surprisingly thin and reedy voice given his imposing appearance.

“Oh, that’s not the point,” the fox whined, “And you never had to listen to my parents, ‘Kiki, why haven’t you seduced any human men yet?’ ‘Kiki, why haven’t you tried to steal anyone’s soul?’ Why haven’t you at least stolen the breath of a sleeping child and laughed at the wails of its parents?’ Kiki, would it be too much for you to murder one lost traveler?’ It was never ending.”

The demon shrugged, then looked over his shoulder and motioned for Naiala to come over.

He was a regular at the coffee shop to the point where Naiala wondered where he spent his time when he wasn’t around, so she didn’t even need to ask what he wanted, another decaff with plenty of cream, almond flavored, but not with amaretto. She still didn’t understand why the demon didn’t drink anything with alcohol in it since most of his kind did and wouldn’t be caught dead in a coffee shop, but she didn’t want to ask for fear that it was another one of his tragic stories.

It seemed that he had more luck in causing himself misery and torment than humans and his latest accomplishment was managing to, somehow, banish himself from hell. Naiala had heard the whole story at least two dozen times and could tell it all herself, right down to the part about the blasphemous forty-nine inverted seals.

“Sure I can top you off,” she smiled, taking the empty mug from him and letting out a silent sigh of relief when he turned back to Kiki.

“If they wanted you to kill someone that badly why didn’t you then?” the demon asked, sounding puzzled.

The fox spirit promptly launched into a long, meandering story about why it was absolutely unthinkable for her to even think about murdering someone at that point in her life. The story was full of melodramatic sighs and a lot of flouncing back and forth across the table with carefully practiced flicks of her tails.

As long as Kiki didn’t knock anything over her histrionics weren’t any of Naiala’s business, so she ignored it and went about her job.

Naiala hadn’t expected what would follow when her ship had ended up sailing over the edge of the world. Until that point she had been one of the more feared pirate captains on her world, or at least she liked to think that she had been. She’d certainly been quite infamous after managing to sink the _Pride of Elandroua_ , the Emperor’s supposedly unsinkable vessel, so there was that. Of course that had been before she and her crew, flush with success, got the brilliant idea to raid the Wurm Fang Coast, where the sands were supposedly glittering with treasure from ships dashed against the jagged rocks during storms.

Pursued by a vengeful dragon, whose treasure she had stolen, she and her crew had pushed farther and farther into the unknown seas past the edge of all maps, until they reached the end of the world itself. Caught between the dragon and the horrifying drop she had tried to skirt the edge and steer the ship to safety, but it had been too late, they’d been caught in the current and were swept over the edge.

The dragon had the good sense to give up the chase, or at least Naiala hoped it had. Given the beings that would show up in the coffee shop she honestly wouldn’t have been surprised for it to arrive one day.

She hadn’t expected to wake up after the fall, but she had, and found herself in a sleepy little seaside town the likes of which she had never seen. The buildings were a mish-mash of different architectural styles and the people she’d encountered walking down the streets, some of them hadn’t been people at all. The locals, used to confused new arrivals, saw her look of wide-eyed confusion and explained to her where she was. Some of them had even tried to help her find the reality that she had come from, but the names, places and dates she knew weren’t enough and in time she had to face the facts. The nexus of worlds was her home now and she needed to find something to do with herself.

It was a long fall, to go from pirate captain to a serving drinks to the inhabitants of the place between worlds, but being a pirate wasn’t profitable in a place where things like the Silvers would rip the skin from your face and the soul from your chest if you crossed them.

One of her fellow employees, an unnaturally pale, severe looking older woman named Chantel, had tried to explain it to her one day while making a macchiato, about how reality was like a bubble, and that there were other bubbles, other realities, and that the nexus was like the walls of the bubbles, how even though the insides of the bubbles were separate, they only had one wall that they all shared. It was a very convoluted explanation, one that Naiala figured meant that Chantel knew as little about it as she did.

After all, Chantel claimed that she was royalty, an ageless vampire queen exiled by her ungrateful subjects and Naiala had seen her smile often enough to know that her teeth, though long and sharp, weren’t made of black iron, nor were her nails, though she let them grow long and claw-like and painted them blood red. And even then, why would a vampire queen work in a coffee shop of all places?

She’d asked Chantel that once and been told, angrily, that it was none of her business and that, as royalty she would not tolerate being spoken to in such a way. Never mind that they were both working as baristas and arguably had fallen on equally hard times.

Naiala brought the demon his coffee and he thanked her.

“I’m ready to order now,” Kiki chimed in, “Green tea and flavor it with the blood of a child please, just four drops.”

“We don’t serve blood here,” Chantel snapped, “If you want that go someplace else.”

“Have you ever heard of a secret menu?” Kiki wrinkled her muzzle and stuck out her little pink tongue at the so-called vampire queen.

Naiala fought back a laugh and interjected before Chantel could respond, “I’ll see what I can do. And do you want it in a cup or a bowl?”

The little fox spirit tilted her head to the side, “A bowl, I always ending up snorting tea up my nose if it’s in a cup.”

That wasn’t true, Naiala had seen her take the form of a young woman and drink tea like a normal person, but that was usually when she had no one to complain to.

“Can do,” Naiala was willing to put up with Kiki’s eccentricities because the fox was a good tipper and always told her to keep the change no matter how much it was.

As Naiala walked past to find a bowl Chantel looked at her hungrily, “Do they have blood here? That little fuzz ball of angst always asks for it. Is it some kind of secret menu thing like she says? Do we even have a secret menu here?”

The former pirate leaned in and whispered, “It’s raspberry syrup, but I think she’s embarrassed that she likes it.”

“Why?” Chantel whispered back, “When her best friend is a demon with a sensitive stomach what’s she got to be ashamed of?”

Naiala shrugged.

The bell over the door jingled as a new customer entered, bringing with them even more drama, albeit of a new and interesting sort.

“It was clearly labeled!” A customer sitting in the booth closest to the door exclaimed, jumping up, “I keep meticulous records! It’s not my fault that no one reads warnings anymore. They’re all think ‘oh, Love Potion No. 9, it’s just like Proposition 65, they say everything will turn you into a toad these days’. Why do you think I stopped using aconite in my recipes?”

“This isn’t about you and your potions for once Annis, though we’re going to need to have a talk about what your sister’s been up to,” the new arrival said, something amorphous and squirming hidden in a trench coat, “I’m looking for someone, someone who’s supposedly a regular here.”

The thing in the coat held out a slime dripping appendage to show Annis a photograph.

She squinted at it, then took out a small pair of polished crystal spectacles, “His hat looks familiar, but I don’t know about that face. No, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone that shiny. Did he buy a cursed amulet from someone? Or a coin from the ruins of the castle of King Midas? I don’t deal in cursed artifacts. The import laws are too arcane even for me.”

“Let me see!” Kiki chimed in and bounded over, looking more like an overly excitable puppy than an evil fox spirit, “Wow he’s handsome! Who is he?”

“Prince Heskiu the Second,” the thing in the coat said grimly, “He was supposed to head home for spring break, but he never arrived. Now classes have started back up and he’s nowhere to be found.

“I don’t remember anyone by that name,” Chantal frowned, looking puddle of slime the thing was leaving on the floor, “Are you’re sure you’re in the right place?”

The thing turned to her and Naiala noticed that its hat was angled just right to prevent her from getting a glimpse at what lay beneath.

“I’m sure,” it glided, or maybe slithered, over to the counter.

Several patrons leaned out of its way, a few going so far as to make warding gestures.

“A face like this is hard to forget,” the thing held out the slime coated picture for both of them to see.

It was right about that, and Kiki was right about the hat being familiar.

Naiala had certainly seen the hat before, just not on the face of a golden death mask, eyes closed in peaceful repose. A crumbling, dried husk of a corpse on the other hand, wrapped in bandages and smelling faintly of dust and, of all things, pumpkin spice blend.

“Does have a brother?” Naiala wondered, “Because there’s Seka. He used to come here all the time. He was so excited about going to college in some place called America. He said he was the first in his family to go.”

“An alias then? Or a case of mistaken identity?” The thing made a thoughtful noise as it retracted its limb, “Did he say where he was going to school?”

“University of Southern California,” Chantel snarled, and for a moment Naiala was willing to believe that she was a vampire, “I remember because my no-good nephew went there.”

“So you think he might have fallen in with a bad crowd?” the thing wondered, leaning towards Chantel.

Chantel ignored the question, eyes narrowing with anger, “He was a respectable boy, an actor when he was alive. He even got lead roles in some of Shakespeare’s plays during their first run. That was when he was alive though. I turned him as a gift for his eighteenth birthday, because he asked me to. And he stayed good for a hundred years or so, then he started getting a little wild. The nineties were when he went crazy, the eighteen nineties mind you, if it had been that recently I would have thought it was just a phase and… Well, it doesn’t matter. He saw one of those films and became obsessed, then they came out with ones with sound. After that he was as good as gone. When he moved to California I was livid. Do you know what kind of movies he wanted to be in? Do you?”

Chantel jabbed a finger at the thing, “Vampire movies! Descended from royalty, thousands of years of tradition and he decided to make a mockery of it!”

“Hey, calm down,” the demon, who until this point had been watching in silence stood up and put a comforting hand on Chantel’s shoulder.

“Get off of me Hell-spawn!” She snarled and stormed off.

“I guess this is a dead end,” the thing sighed.

“I don’t know,” Naiala offered helpfully, “Seka said that he was interested in movies with ghosts in them. Not ghost movies, but movies where an actor died during production and their spirit appeared during the filming. He’d talked about hoping for his _Ba_ and _Ka_ souls to get the chance to talk to some of them. If he managed to meet up with any of them then you could always try a medium. Maybe one of those dead film stars saw him last.”

The thing’s coat rippled as it laughed, “Ghosts? You really expect me to believe that ghosts were involved in the Prince’s disappearance?”

The former pirate captain considered bringing up the fact that it was asking that question in a coffee shop in the place between worlds, one that employed a possible vampire, frequented by spirits, demons and who knew what else, all while investigating a missing mummy, then thought better of it.

“Hey!” A harpy sitting at the far end of the bar screeched, “You’ve got other customers here waiting to order you know!”

Naiala shook her head.

It was just another day at work.

**Author's Note:**

> If this seems random and silly, that's because it is. The request that inspired this fic was amazing. FairestCat asked for a story set in a coffee shop that could use any combination of the following character prompts: Former Pirate Turned Barista, Disgraced Vampire Queen Moonlighting As A Barista, Young fox spirit whose relatives are disappointed they haven't seduced or murdered anyone yet, Demon Who Has Accidentally Locked Himself Out Of Hell And Just Wants To Go Home, Skeptical Paranormal Investigator Tentacle Monster With A Heart Of Gold, Magicshop Clerk Tired Of Dealing With People Who Don't Read The Warning Labels On Potions, Reanimated Egyptian Mummy With A BA In Film Studies From USC, and, Actor Cast As A Vampire Who Is Actually A Vampire. I might have gone a little overboard, but with a cast of characters like that to chose from, wouldn't you? So if you liked this piece of randomness, please don't thank me, thank FairestCat for having the idea in the first place.


End file.
